Contingent Claims Contracting for Purchasing Decisions in Inventory Management

Option pricing is a common and important practice in the financial community, and has become a fundamental theoretical construct in financial economics. The theory is quite rich and has potential uses in many other problem domains. This paper develops a variant of the theory as applied to inventory planning. In particular, we consider a risk management approach that uses negotiated option contracts for hedging against price and quantity uncertainty in inventory procurement. We derive conditions for the inclusion of options in inventory control as a function both of managerial attitudes toward risk and of the correlation between price and demand.